Humility is about making Jesus bigger. We make Jesus bigger by thinking and praying about Him. Demons still howl and flee when Jesus is bigger in us, bigger than our concern for self.

Jesus never did, and still doesn’t, have a problem with a spirituality based on close reading of the Bible and earnest prayer based on that close reading. He has a problem with people not doing that enough.

The trick, very often, is just to get started. Jesus and Holy Scripture have provided the words, and praying them, we find our own. And finding our own, we discover, by one of the joyous paradoxes of Providence, that they were His all along, and so we are His, and our whole lives becoming prayers.

Having heaven as our aim means submitting everything to it now. It means digging deep into scripture daily to learn more about God’s presence, power and will. It means the steady labor of turning as much of ourselves as we have toward as much of God as we understand, which is what the Bible means by “pray without ceasing”.

If we want to be the kind of people who are prepared to create the next institutions that will lift, advance, and bless the culture we need to do what St. Benedict did, and cultivate an orderly life that makes time daily not just for work, but also for study and prayer, who have a rational relationship with information technology, who find in the Bible an answer for the dull ennui and psychic despair that is the daily bread of so many young people.

It takes the Church to understand what Jesus is talking about, that is serious about praying, thinking, reading, writing, and knowing Jesus.

This promise seems obviously false because almost everyone lacks a grown-up understanding of prayer.

Jesus has power to heal, power to forgive, power to cleanse, power to save – but only for people who will make up their minds to trust Him.

When we pray we are turning as much of ourselves as we have toward as much of God as we understand.

We are always on his mind. That is what Jesus was doing when he prayed.

We need someone who says every day, prays every day: “My faith is not my own. Someone else needs it.”

How? All of them had been looking, talking, thinking, praying, studying, and wondering – about the redemption of Israel for a long time.